Bachelor's thesis

Abstract

Volume rendering and exploration is of high importance in the medical context, where many different modalities produce high resolution volumetric data. Even with high quality volume rendering, exploration of these data sets is still challenging, due to the limited 3D perception on a screen and challenging interaction with the volume. Unreal Engine provides out of the box support for rendering to VR headsets, easing the technical challenges associated with serving these display devices. The goal of this project is to evaluate the suitability of Unreal Engine 4 with a HTC Vive VR headset for volume rendering and volume exploration. The first step towards such a system is to implement a method for loading medical volumes into a format suitable for the unreal engine. In a next step, a recently published plugin for volume rendering [1] shall be extended to support classical cutting planes and general transfer functions. Depending on the outcome of the previous steps, another goal is to potentially propose new or adapted interaction methods leveraging the Vive controllers to support volume slicing, annotations, and/or interactive editing of visualization parameters. [1]https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?143716

Prerequisites

C++ Programming skills

beneficial: Experience with UE4/Unity or other Game Engines

beneficial: Knowledge of GPU Volume Raycasting

Contact

Volume rendering and exploration is of high importance in the medical context, where many different modalities produce high resolution volumetric data. Even with high quality volume rendering, exploration of these data sets is still challenging, due to the limited 3D perception on a screen and challenging interaction with the volume. Unreal Engine provides out of the box support for rendering to VR headsets, easing the technical challenges associated with serving these display devices. The goal of this project is to evaluate the suitability of Unreal Engine 4 with a HTC Vive VR headset for volume rendering and volume exploration. The first step towards such a system is to implement a method for loading medical volumes into a format suitable for the unreal engine. In a next step, a recently published plugin for volume rendering [1] shall be extended to support classical cutting planes and general transfer functions. Depending on the outcome of the previous steps, another goal is to potentially propose new or adapted interaction methods leveraging the Vive controllers to support volume slicing, annotations, and/or interactive editing of visualization parameters. [1]https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?143716